‘I think she knew she was in too deep, and she needed help.’ Libby looked up, gazing at each of them in turn. ‘The script, I imagine was the one I gave her. The photos she stole from Marcus. She told me … When I spilt my coffee, that lunchtime, it was because she was beckoning to me through the window. I needed an excuse to slip away and speak to her, where no one would see us.’

‘Except Kit did,’ Caro said. ‘He told us you were arguing about your phone.’

‘He caught the start, then,’ Libby said. ‘We were arguing about how it wasn’t safe for Clementine to stay at Aldermere. She’d messaged me on Friday night and told me she’d been approached by a private detective. He’d told her Marcus was a blackmailer, and she’d searched Marcus’s room to see if he was telling the truth. She found photos and files and stuff – including ones of you three. She sent me a photo of some of them with a Post-it note message on the top.’

‘Should we warn them?’ Posy said. ‘We found it in the pages of her script.’

‘Why send the notes on the script pages though?’ Caro asked.

Libby shrugged. ‘So you’d know this was connected to Lettice and Dahlia, of course. That there was more to this than just the photos.’

‘But why didn’t she meet us, then?’ Caro’s forehead creased up in a frown.

‘She definitely planned to.’ Libby sounded more certain about this than a lot of her story. ‘She told me that much at lunchtime. You three were her insurance policy.’

Rosalind exchanged looks with the other two Dahlias. ‘How, exactly?’

‘She was going to share her secrets with you, knowing that you’d have to keep them, because she knew yours too,’ Libby explained. ‘Marcus … he’d threated Hugh that he’d tell the world about Clementine if he and Isobel hadn’t paid up the money he’d demanded by the end of the convention.’

‘His grand finale,’ Posy whispered. ‘That was what he had planned.’

‘She wanted our help to stop him?’ Caro guessed.

Libby nodded. ‘Like I said, she wanted to be part of the family more than she wanted the money. And if Marcus ruined Hugh …’

‘She’d never be truly welcome at Aldermere,’ Rosalind finished for her.

‘I think she hoped that giving you the photos would help you trust her.’ There was a hint of a smile as Libby looked down at her hands. ‘She grew up watching you. We both did, in a way. Rosalind and Caro as Dahlia, and Posy in all those teen movies. I guess she felt like she knew you. Trusted you. It’s funny, isn’t it? How you can feel you know a person when all you’ve ever seen is them pretending to be someone else.’